rhyme / reason
- poem / abstract

metaphore / simile
- rooms / linear menus


Using linear pull down menus is like having to climb ladders to get
where you're going.  There's a more natural metaphore for round pie
menus, though.  I think of pie menus as rooms with doors leading off
in different directions.  Navigating a tree of nested pie menus is
like running around a building or an adventure game.  You can learn
how to get to a certian selection, by remembering a spatial path from
room to room.  Then you just move the mouse along that path, clicking
through each door, and you're there.  




I've heard about Rooms, and I like the idea a lot. But what I'm
talking about is pie menus. i.e. not full screen desktop layouts, but
circular pop-up menus, as a metaphore for rooms. I think that the two
metaphores are well matched and could be combined synergistically.

In the pie menu "room" metaphore, a "room" is a menu, and a "door" is
a menu item.

You point to an object on the screen and click to pop up a pie menu of
items relating to that object.

The pie menu pops up with the cursor in the middle of the room, with
the doors arranged in a circle around the cursor, all leading off in
different directions.

You go through a door by moving the cursor in its direction and
clicking. Going through a door either completes the selection, causing
some action to be performed on the object, or leads you to another
room, popping up another pie submenu.

The important difference between pop-up pie menus and pull-down linear
menus is that pie menus are based on direction, and linear menus are
based on distance. With pie menus, the cursor motion necessary to make
a selection is always small, and the area of the wedge shaped
selection targets is large. You can indicate a direction without
looking at the screen, and you get more and more angular precision as
you move the cursor out further. Furthermore, they're non-proprietary,
so nobody will sue you for implementing them!